Kolya got back in the vehicle.
“There is a rear entrance, but you have to go by the back door of the Chinese restaurant,” Kolya said. “Two of the bus boys are back there right now catching a smoke.”
Aleks glanced at his watch. He opened his laptop. Within moments he got on a nearby wi-fi network. He entered the address for People’s Legal Services on Google Maps and zoomed in. If the image was accurate, there was access to the target building via a fire escape from the roof to the top floor. He pointed to the image.
“Is this still there?”
Kolya squinted at the screen. He probably needed glasses but was far too vain to get them. “I didn’t see it. I wasn’t looking up.”
Aleks had given the man a simple task, an undemanding reconnaissance of the rear of the building. He was clearly not his father.
Aleks knew he needed Kolya. But not for long.
“Wait here,” he said. “And keep the engine running.”
P
EOPLE
’
S LEGAL SERVICES
was at the end of a long hallway on the second floor. Aleks entered the building one door east of the building, and then taken the stairs to the roof. Once there, he crossed over and descended the fire escape and entered Harkov’s building on the fourth floor.
On the way down the back stairs, Aleks scanned the landings for surveillance cameras. He saw none. Still, as he entered, he put on a ball cap and pulled up the collar on his leather coat. He met no one.
When he reached the door to 206 he stopped, listened. From inside the office he heard the sound of a Russian-language radio program. He heard no other voices. He glanced both ways down the hallway. He was alone. He took a cloth from his pocket, turned the doorknob. The door opened onto a small, messy anteroom. To one side was an old pickled oak desk, covered with newspapers, magazines, and advertising flyers, all yellowed, all coated with the dust of months. Against one wall was a rusting file cabinet. The room was empty. As he had thought, there was no secretary.
Aleks closed the door gently behind him, turned the lock. When he appeared in the doorway to the inner office the man at the desk appeared startled.
“Are you Viktor Harkov?”
The old man looked at Aleks over the top of his filmy bifocals. He was lank and cadaverous, with thinning gray hair, a liver-spotted scalp. He wore a drab suit, tattered at the cuffs, a yellowed shirt and knit tie. The clothes sagged on his skeletal frame.
“The son of Jakob and Adele,” the old man said. “How can I help you?”
Aleks stepped into the inner office. “I am here to enquire about your services.”
The man nodded, looked Aleks up and down. “Where are you from?”
Aleks closed the door behind him. “I am from Kolossova.”
Color drained from Harkov’s face. “I am not familiar with this place.”
The man was lying. Aleks had expected this. “It is a small village in south-eastern Estonia.” He glanced toward the smudged windows. The buildings across the street had windows facing this office. He crossed the room, lowered the blinds, all the while keeping an eye on Harkov’s hands. He would be surprised if a man in Harkov’s world – a man with a sordid past of trafficking in human flesh – did not possess a firearm, a gun kept close at hand.
Aleks reached into his coat, removed a cheap, packable raincoat, no larger than a pack of cigarettes. “We have business, Mr Harkov.”
“And what business would this be?”
Aleks slipped on the raincoat and a pair of thin latex gloves. “In spring 2005 you brokered an adoption of two little Estonian girls.”
“I have been legal counsel for many adoptions. I do not remember them all.”
“Of course,” Aleks said. The subject was talking. This was good. If he said one thing, he may say another. He opened the shoulder bag, took out a roll of duct tape.
“How old are you?” Aleks asked. “That is, if you do not object to my asking.”
The man considered him for a moment, his deeply creased brow furrowed. “I am eighty years old on my next birthday. In three weeks.”
Aleks nodded. He knew this was a milestone Viktor Harkov would never reach. He did the math in his head. Viktor Harkov would have been too young to fight as a soldier in World War II. He was not too old to have been in a concentration or displaced person’s camp.
“And you?” Harkov asked. “How old are you?”
Lawyers
, Aleks thought. He found no reason to lie. “I am thirty-three.”
Harkov took it in. “What are you going to do here today?”
“That depends,” Aleks said. “Are you going to answer my question? About the two Estonian girls?”
“I cannot tell you anything. This is confidential information.”
Aleks nodded. “With which hand do you write?”
Silence.
Aleks reached over to the desk, picked up a snow globe – a festive winter scene of what Aleks now knew was Times Square – and tossed it. The man raised both hands to catch it, favoring the right. He was right-handed. Aleks walked around the desk. He put his foot against the right wheel of the desk chair. Harkov tried to turn the chair, but was unable. Aleks took the snow globe from Harkov’s grasp. He then took hold of the man’s left arm, just below the wrist.
He wrapped duct tape around the man’s chest, his left arm, his ankles, leaving the right arm free. This arm he duct-taped to the chair, leaving enough room for the forearm and wrist to move. Enough room to write. He placed a pen in the man’s slack hand, a blank legal pad on the desk in front of him.
He finished by cutting off the man’s trousers and stained underwear. Harkov, naked now from the waist down, trembled in fear, but said nothing.
“Do you know Radio Moscow, Mr Harkov?”
Harkov glared at him, remained silent.
Aleks would bet that the old man knew Radio Moscow to be the official international broadcast station of the former USSR, the station that ultimately became the Voice of Russia. Aleks had a different meaning.
From his shoulder bag Aleks removed a pair of electrical wires, each about six feet in length, a pair of alligator clips, and a pair of large dry cell batteries. Harkov watched his every move with his tiny hawk’s eyes.
Aleks lifted the desk telephone, loosened the screws at the bottom, removed the plate, and hooked the phone up in sequence to the two large batteries.
He unspooled the wires, wrapped one wire around the man’s big toe – a wire that would act as a ground – and attached the other to the end of the man’s flaccid penis. Harkov winced at the pain, but made no sound.
“Some have called this the Tucker Telephone, out of respect and courtesy to its inventor, I suppose. To me it will always be Radio Moscow.”
Harkov struggled feebly against his restraints. Aleks could see bloodied spittle running from the corner of his mouth. The man had bitten his tongue.
“It really is quite ingenious,” Aleks continued. “Whenever this phone rings, it will send a charge through the wires, to your genitals. I understand it is quite painful. We used it often in Grozny, but then it was only for men who had been fighting for a cause, a cause they believed in.” Aleks took out one of his prepaid cellphones.
“You, on the other hand, are guilty of something far worse. You stole a child from its mother. In all of nature, this is punishable by death. I do not see why human beings should be any different.”
Aleks held up the cellphone.
“You can’t do this,” Harkov breathed.
“Two little girls, Mr Harkov. Where did they go?”
“I . . . I help people,” Harkov said. His body began to tremble even more violently. Sweat dripped from his brow.
“Have you ever thought for one moment that you might be destroying lives on the other end of your deals?” Aleks touched three numbers on his cellphone.
“These children are un
wanted
.”
“Not all of them.” Three more numbers.
“You don’t understand. People come to me and they are desperate for children. They give them good homes. A loving environment. Many people say they will help. I take action. I make a difference.”
“Two little girls from Estonia,” Aleks said, ignoring him. His finger hovered over the final digit.
Harkov thrashed in his chair. “I will never tell you.
Never!
”
“Moscow calling, Mr Harkov.” Aleks hit the last number. Seconds later the telephone on the desk rang, sending current along the wires.
A flash of orange sparks ignited Harkov’s pubic hair. The man screamed, but it was soon muffled by a greasy garage rag Aleks shoved into his mouth. Harkov’s body shuddered for a moment, then fell limp. Aleks lifted the handset, replaced it. He snapped an ammonia capsule beneath his nose. The man came to. Aleks pulled out the rag, got close to his ear.
“Tell me where the files are located. Two little Estonian girls. Little girls you had stolen from their mother’s womb. Girls you had a man named Mikko Vänskä spirit away in the night. I want to know the name and address of the people who adopted them.”
Nothing. Harkov’s head lolled on his shoulders.
Aleks shoved the rag back into the man’s mouth, dialed again. Again the phone rang. Harkov shrieked in pain. This close, Aleks could smell the cooking flesh. He also knew that Harkov’s bowels had released.
Another ammonia capsule.
Aleks walked to the window for a moment. Harkov mumbled something into his gag. Aleks returned, tapped the man’s right hand. Harkov wrote a scribbled word on the pad. Unreadable. Aleks hit redial on his phone. Another jolt. This time the tail of Viktor Harkov’s yellowed dress shirt caught fire. Aleks let it burn for a second, then doused the flame.
The office was becoming a landfill of offensive odors. Greasy flesh, burning hair, feces, sweat. Aleks pulled Harkov’s head back. The man’s face was bathed in perspiration. Aleks pinched the fleshy part of the man’s nostrils until he came back to consciousness.
“Two little girls,” Aleks repeated.
Nothing.
Aleks reached into the bag, pulled out a small alligator clip. He detached the clip from Harkov’s genitals, and connected the wire to the smaller clip. This he attached to one of Harkov’s eyelids.
On the desk was a photograph taken perhaps sometime in the 1970s, a picture of a thin, nervous looking teenaged boy.
“This is your son?” Aleks asked.
Harkov nodded slightly.
“If I do not find the people I am looking for, I will pay this man a visit. It is far too late to save yourself – indeed, the account of this day was written years ago when you crossed my path – but you have the opportunity, right now, to give me what I want. If you do, you have my word that no harm will come to him.”
Aleks removed the gag from the old man’s mouth, but Harkov said nothing.
Once more, Moscow called Viktor Harkov. The charge burned away the entire eyelid in a flash of bright blue flame.
Two minutes later, the old man told Aleks everything.
A
LEKS FOUND THE
files in the bottom drawer of the steel cabinet in the corner of the outer office. Inside the cabinet he noticed the remains of a long-ago forgotten lunch, a moldy brown paper bag dotted with rodent stool. In this tableau lived the horrors of old age, Aleks thought, of its infirmities and disease and trials, in here were the whispers of these days before death, a feeling he would never know, a . . .
. . . triumph over eternity in the moment he strides up the hill, the field of corpses thick beneath his feet, the screams of the dying a dark sonata in the distance. The stone farmhouse has taken many mortar rounds, its pitted façade now a defiant intaglio. Inside he knows he will find his answers . . .
A
LEKS GLANCED OUT
the window, at the street. Kolya sat in the Hummer, a pair of earphones in his ears. He smoked a cigarette. The world continued to turn. The world was not going to miss this man who traded in human flesh, who brokered children in the night.
Aleks turned back to the dead man, took out his knife, and finished his work.
B
EFORE OPENING THE DOOR
, Aleks looked at the documents. There were two files, two families with twin girls. Both were in the right time frame from four years earlier. Both were brokered through Helsinki. There was no further detail on the children, other than their gender and their date of passage to the United States.
And, most importantly, their names and addresses.
Before he stepped into the hallway Aleks turned back to the room. He had not touched anything without his gloves on. He had worn the plastic raincoat and his ball cap nearly the entire time. Although the offices were covered in dust, the path from the door to Viktor Harkov’s desk was swept clean. Aleks had not left shoeprints in the dust. Only the most sophisticated of forensic evidence gathering would reveal that he had ever been in these rooms, and even if a man like Viktor Harkov warranted such attention, Aleks would be long gone by the time he was identified.
Still, he had now committed murder in a country not his own. He could never undo this, or take it back. Everything had changed.
In Estonia he knew where all the bolt-holes were, had several identities in several safe houses along the Narva River. He knew how the police operated, how the politicians operated, who could be trusted, who could be bought. He knew the when, the where, the how and, most importantly, the how
much
. This was different. This was the United States.
He walked slowly down the hallway to the stairs. He did not use the handrail. When he reached the back door he used his shoulder to open it. The alley behind the building was empty. Moments later he rounded the corner and put the plastic bag containing the bloody raincoat and latex gloves in a trashcan.
When he slipped into the vehicle, Kolya considered him, but did not say a word. Aleks nodded. The Hummer pulled slowly into the stream of traffic.